Many processes require the ability to write to data locations which should not or perhaps can not be written to. Recovery processes, operating system processes and other processes may wish to write changes to such data locations. Administrators may want to ensure that data remains unmodified to preserve its original state for many reasons. The data may be backup data which must remain unmodified to ensure that a viable backup copy exists. The data may be an image file of an operating system, a platform or other system which an administrator or owner of the data may want to maintain as a master or a base image. The data may also be write protected or read only data. For example, it may be a snapshot volume and the volume may not be writable. In order to enable a recovery process, an operating system process, or other processes to write to such data locations, administrators may copy the data to a new volume, partition, or other storage area that is writable. Backup data, platform images and other non-modifiable data may be quite large. Moving such data may require significant additional storage space. Moving such data may also require significant time and may delay restoration or other processes that depend on access to the data. Additionally, data, such as backup data, may be replaced with new backups, and therefore maintaining a writable version of such data may require multiple copy operations and potentially multiple stored copies.
In view of the foregoing, it may be understood that there are significant problems and shortcomings associated with current techniques for accessing backups or other data which is not modifiable.